“Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity – not a threat.” (Steve Jobs). Here are some things that changed during last month related to GCP – and might create opportunities for you:

1. Visualizing GCP: “A picture is worth thousands words”. For all visual learners like myself, I strongly recommend the book “Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects” by Lead Developer Advocate, Google, Priyanka Vergadia.

2. Network Connectivity: When you get the networking right in the Cloud, everything else becomes much more easy and enjoyable. Check this article as a starting point to understand network connectivity possibilities in GCP and how Network Connectivity Center helps manage them from a central place. In addition, read “10 considerations to help you design cloud networks”.

3. Cloud Security: The monthly must-read when it comes to cloud- and cyber security – “Cloud CISO Perspectives: April 2022” by Phil Venables, CISO of Google Cloud.

4. Learning / Training: Get one month of free training on Cousera provided by Google Cloud.

5. SWIFT on GCP: The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is a messaging system that runs on a network of financial institutions. It is used by thousands of banks worldwide to communicate information on financial transactions in a secure and standardized way. The new solution, Alliance Connect Virtual, enables SWIFT customers to connect to the SWIFT network directly from the public cloud and deploy SWIFT VPN connections based on traditional physical hardware as virtual appliances in the public cloud. Google Cloud is creating a reference implementation of SWIFT components on Google Cloud to help customers meet SWIFT security and operational requirements, increase operational efficiency, and accelerate adoption of cloud technologies for their core payment applications. Learn more about it here.

6. BigQuery: The new feature Information Schema “gives customers easy access and visibility to BigQuery metadata and metrics”.

7. CDN for media: Google Cloud has announced the general availability of Media CDN, a CDN that is optimized for rich media content to be delivered with “exceptional experiences to your users, no matter where they are”. Media CDN is built on the same network that powers YouTube.

8. Service Catalog: Service Catalog got a nice update and can now handle multiple Terraform versions.

9. Dataflow Templates: No clickbaiting, I swear: Read this useful overview on how Dataflow Templates can help you speed up when it comes to building data pipelines that transfer your data to BigQuery or other GCP data storage solutions.

10. Google Cloud Logging: There are new improvements for Google Cloud Looging that help you find the information that you need faster. Read on in this article.

11. Istio: Google submits Istio project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to bring it even closer to Kubernetes and “make it easier for contributors and customers to demonstrate support and governance in line with the standards of other critical cloud-native projects”.

12. Spark on GKE: As Spark on GKE is now GA, you can “run Spark workloads on a self-managed GKE cluster”.

13. SRE: If you want to learn more about Site Reliability Engineering while driving, listen to the new SRE-Podcast.

14. Cloud SQL: Cloud SQL launches support for in-place upgrades, now in preview for PostgreSQL and SQL-Server. You can find the details here.

15. Data Cloud Summit 22: Have you missed Data Cloud Summit 22? Here’s the wrap-up including the announcement of BigLake, “a storage engine that allows you to unify data warehouses and lakes” and of Analytics Hub, “a new fully managed service, available in Q3, in preview, that helps you unlock the value of data sharing, leading to new insights and increased business value.”

16. Encryption: Google brings new functionalities to its external Key Manager (Cloud EKM). Read more here.

17. VM Management and Operations: Do you want to know how to improve application monitoring when using virtual machines on GCP? This article about best practices for the OpsAgent got you covered. In addition, here’s a nice post on medium about how to secure access to applications running on VMs with Identity Aware Proxy.

That’s it for now. Enjoy spring as much as possible and stay safe & healthy.

Jörn